OpenAI declares ‘huge focus’ on enterprise growth with array of partnerships

OpenAI touted new partnerships to incorporate its AI products across diverse industries at its developer conference on Monday, aiming to drive the strong momentum it has enjoyed among consumers to its enterprise business.

“You should expect a huge focus from us on really leaning into enterprise,” CEO Sam Altman told journalists at a press conference following his keynote at San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center.

The company revealed a flurry of collaborations with companies including Spotify, Zillow and Mattel while debuting a set of fresh tools to help developers build new applications.

That included a way for other apps to plug into ChatGPT and allow a user to ask questions or perform tasks in the app. One engineer gave a live demo showing how someone could use ChatGPT to generate a readymade playlist in Spotify, or ask Zillow to narrow down a list of properties to just show those with three bedrooms and three bathrooms.

Executives said this was the start of a broader vision of transforming ChatGPT into a central portal where users can access a broader range of services.

“What you’re going to see over the next six months is an evolution of ChatGPT from an app that is really, really useful into something that feels a little bit more like an operating system,” ChatGPT head Nick Turley said.

Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president, underscored that OpenAI was “committed to building the best enterprise platform.”

News of OpenAI’s partnerships led shares of some of its partners like Zillow and Figma to climb initially, a sign of how the ChatGPT maker’s imprimatur has become a way to legitimize companies’ positioning in AI. Earlier on Monday, shares of AMD surged more than 34% after it signed a deal supplying chips to OpenAI.

Spotify said in a press release about its partnership that it would not share user data with OpenAI to train models. Asked if the same policy applied to the other deals, Turley said it would abide by the preferences users selected in their data settings.

OpenAI had always planned to target the enterprise market, but its AI models were not previously ready for the higher demands of business-use cases, Altman said.

“We needed to let the models get better. The models are there now,” he said, adding that the company had selected “a few active early partnerships.”

Brockman said the work that went into its models’ self-claimed gold medal performance at the International Mathematical Olympiad would generate benefits for enterprises in other ways.

OpenAI and other tech giants such as Alphabet and Microsoft have courted enterprise AI deals to help justify massive spikes in spending, though the returns across the industry have so far failed to match investment, recent surveys showed.

The ChatGPT-maker outlined ambitious new plans in the last month to build $1 trillion or more of computing capacity and launched a viral AI-video-generating app called Sora, which has shot to the top of Apple’s app rankings.

All this has made OpenAI a massive money-losing operation to date. Altman said it was “not in my top 10 concerns, but we obviously someday have to be very profitable.”

Monday’s moves are the latest in a stream of announcements for OpenAI, which sparked the modern AI boom with the launch of ChatGPT about three years ago.

Many of Altman’s ambitions are bold and expensive even by Silicon Valley standards, sparking some concerns among tech investors about whether or not AI investments are a bubble.

Altman said during the question-answer session that many areas of the AI industry are “kind of bubbly,” but that “real value will get created.”